View From Second Life Trenches: Are You a Pioneer or a Settler?

A featured session at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference

Cynthia Calongne, (also known as Lyr Lobo in Second Life) joined the Computer Science Department at Colorado Technical University (CTU) in 1996. She develops and teaches undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses that benefit from activities and projects in Second Life. For over thirteen years, she worked as a software engineer in support of Air Force Space Command and on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Her doctoral research included designing and building a PC-based immersive virtual reality system and a new user interface for it.

Today, her research includes the use of games and game-based rubrics in education, and she has presented a dozen papers on user interface design, online education, educational game design and education in Second Life. She works with 100 8th grade students on the Ramapo islands in the Teen Grid of Second Life and supports the English Village' s ESL roleplaying games. In 2005, she completed an artificial intelligence project for San Juan College and the National Science Foundation.